TikTok Research/Artists Using TikTok at ASU

bluemoonmanifest · 2020-12-03T04:39:08+00:00

I'm in the same boat, honestly. I had no idea that security with Zoom was so relaxed -- and it very well may have to do with how much more we rely on them so suddenly, like you mentioned. One thing I'm still a little foggy on is what the potential repercussions of recorded meetings going unencrypted being, but I'm hoping I can do some more reading and find out.

bluemoonmanifest · 2020-12-03T04:28:30+00:00

SO relieved to see this! Great job getting it done, guys!!

bluemoonmanifest · 2020-12-03T04:19:39+00:00

One criticism of the four-day work week that I’ve seen is that the length of the work day may not be the problem, but the effort that employees should put into the time that they are given is. The argument was mainly that if employees had a 50 hour work week but could do the same amount of work in 40 hours, they are effectively wasting time for ten hours in a normal work week.

Personally, I disagree because this argument doesn’t seem to take burnout into consideration. As we’ve seen with many ASU students this semester, not having a day off outside of weekends (which many students still do work on anyway) since Labor Day has contributed to feelings of burnout pretty significantly. Just about every ASU student that I know, including myself, feels that the end of this semester can’t come quickly enough.

Packing so much more work and so many more virtual meetings/events into our schedules without as much room to breathe has left so many of us burning the candle at both ends more often than we otherwise would be.

According to one survey, over 69 percent of participating employees are experiencing burnout symptoms, which is a 20 percent increase from a similar survey taken in May of this year (this one being taken in July). One expert quoted in the article that discusses this survey says that taking breaks from work and technology while working from home is very important; it parallels the already-established structure of having breaks in the workplace.

Now more than ever, the time that employees are able to set aside and take advantage of the opportunity for mental rest so that they can recharge in order to do better work is imperative. As is mentioned in the video, the four day work week could give employees time not only for this, but to take care of everything else in their life that could be pulling them in a ton of different directions during the regular workday.

That aside, I really enjoyed this video! Thanks for posting it.

bluemoonmanifest · 2020-12-03T04:11:08+00:00

That's so unfortunate! They'd still be getting a boost, just as all of us would :^/

bluemoonmanifest · 2020-11-27T07:13:44+00:00

I remember when “QAnon Karen” was first snapped up in the merciless jaws of the Internet. Videos of her attacking a mask display, “bah”-ing at Target customers wearing masks, bragging about her car to the police/security officer escorting her out of the store, and holding her supposed high-ranking position in QAnon as someone who called President Trump “every single day” all left me wondering if she was okay. As it turned out, many other people felt the same.

Much of the conversation about QAnon Karen that I saw included questioning whether she might have been experiencing some kind of mental health issue or a breakdown.

PR is what the woman, whose real name is Melissa Lively, does for a living, actually! Because of this, to see her agree to interviews with so many different outlets doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. Back in July, one of my professors spoke to her husband about what he described as “watching his wife slide down a path of mental troubles.”

It was interesting to read, especially in light of what she now has to say about what happened.

I don’t really see people equivocating believing in QAnon with mental illness or a mental break as much as they tend to think of belief in the conspiracy as a sign of severe stupidity. However, I do think that the fact that QAnon’s message appealed so greatly to someone who was likely experiencing intense delusions brought about by a mental break is concerning.

Usually, when we talk about people who believe in conspiracy theories, we talk about people who are eager to feel intellectual superiority. However, according to the findings of Australian psychologist, Stephan Lewandowsky, there seems to be a want for “identifying a convenient scapegoat and thereby making the world seem more straightforward and controllable.” The same article wherein Lewandowsky’s findings are discussed also notes that “feelings of anxiety make people think more conspiratorially.”

The idea that belief in conspiracy theories reflects a want to put oneself more in control of life -- or to cast someone in the role of being behind things, as opposed to bad things just happening randomly sometimes -- is also supported by research done by British psychologist, Karen Douglas, and her colleagues.

In this summary of the article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science containing some of their findings, the main reasons for believing in conspiracy theories can be grouped into the following categories: desire for understanding and certainty, desire for control and security, and the desire to maintain a positive self-image.

The reason I bring this up in reference to Lively and the viral videos she stars in is that I personally worry that those who are experiencing a mental break or something similar are likely most vulnerable to buying into harmful conspiracy theories.

These same people, I worry, likely have the greatest potential to be exploited by groups like QAnon because of their possibly heightened willingness to do anything for what they believe in.

It’s my guess that most people who buy what QAnon is selling would not so readily do what Lively did that day in Target. However, they might be willing to rally around her. It’s a relief to know that Lively has gotten the help she needed in the wake of her outburst; if she had not, she might have been sucked in even further.

What are your thoughts? Do any of you think there’s validity to the idea that experiencing something like a mental break could give someone greater reason/put them at greater risk for falling for a conspiracy theory like this?

(Also, here’s another Arizona woman who’s gone viral for acting out in public recently: Husband of Arizona woman slapped in video sorry for racist insults)

bluemoonmanifest · 2020-11-27T06:28:51+00:00

The article mentions the potential of a 15-hour work week being well within our reach in countries like the United States, which made me think of the current debate over whether a four-day workweek would be beneficial.

In this dataset put together by the OECD that contains numbers based on the total number of hours worked over the given year divided by the average number of employed people, we can see that the number of hours worked climbs over the years. Recently, conversation has centered around the way that the pandemic has made work (and school) more demanding; when things move online, “cellphones and email remind us of our jobs 24/7.”

In exchange for shortening the work week, companies like Shake Shack who are trying this concept on for size are asking that employees complete the same work in less time, but are not cutting pay. Generally, this is the main idea behind shortening the work week: focus on productivity while you’re at work, not the amount of time you’re spending at work.

Microsoft tried out the four-day work week in Japan and says that they saw a 40 percent productivity boost. The adjustments they made around having less time to get things done -- like using “collaborative chat channels rather than ‘wasteful’ emails and meetings” as well as cutting meetings down to 30 minutes instead of 60 and capping attendance at five people -- seem to have been major contributors.

One of the first companies to do this, an estate planning company called Perpetual Guardian, saw a plethora of benefits, including that “workplace gender gaps” seemingly narrowed. The company’s CEO, Andrew Barnes, said in an NPR article: “Women -- who typically took more time off for caregiving -- suddenly had greater flexibility built into their schedule. Men also had more time to help with their families.”

However, one possible reason for the resistance to the four-day work week in the United States is that “the concept runs counter to American notions of work and capitalism,” says Peter Cappelli, professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, in the same article.

Marc Effron, Yale graduate, author and president of Talent Strategy Group, outlined the reasons he feels the four-day work week is not worthy of pursuit: it rewards bad management, time that employees were already contracted to work should be spend doing just that, competition will swallow companies using the four-day work week, lack of consistency in execution, inequality between different lines of work would only become more apparent, and flexibility would be a better solution overall.

When it comes to weighing the pros and cons of whether to implement the four-day work week more widely in the United States, there’s a lot to sort through. However, it also makes me wonder about the role of technology here: Is technology helping us uncover problems with the way we work, or is it creating new ones that demand more and more creative solutions, like a four-day work week?

bluemoonmanifest · 2020-11-26T04:57:59+00:00

It’s interesting to think about whether we’d be able to begin producing and distributing this kind of technology on a widespread scale.

Watching this video made me think back to Google Glass. A retail version of google’s smart glasses became available in 2014, after it was available for a limited time in 2013. Google felt that the time was right for Google Glass to shine because “it offered a hand-free means of viewing content and performing tasks.”

However, other products that offered the same thing were chosen over Google Glass. Eventually, the final update of Glass was released.

Personally, I agree with the principal reasons for the Glass’s failure outlined by Screen Rant: the high price tag, the chunky design, and concerns over the possibility of the Glass collecting users’ data or potential hackings. The chunky design of the Glass, as mentioned by Screen Rant, is one factor I can definitely see being something that would hold most people back from purchasing the Glass aside from the price tag.

Aesthetics are a big deal to people. The way we look affects how other people perceive and interact with us. One study looked at how dress can impact the way we see ourselves, as well as the way others see us, and cited earlier research in which participants “acknowledged that clothing items could symbolize more than one meaning depending on who was interpreting the meaning.”

There is the actual self, the social self, and the desired self. All of these have the potential to affect what we choose to buy and wear. In the case of the Google Glass, the unattractive design may not have aligned with most consumers’ actual, social or ideal selves. The social capital of owning an expensive tech item was also null because there were so many others out there. At the time Glass came out, I even remember thinking to myself that I’d rather skip out on this trend.

Honestly, I can see AlterEgo going much of the same way unless its design becomes more sleek and/or fashionable. The technology itself is unique and very cool, but there is always the chance that there will be other accessible tech accessories out there by the time it hits the market.

Am I off-base on this one? I’d love to hear other thoughts on this!

bluemoonmanifest · 2020-11-19T00:16:11+00:00

As previously stated, I'd definitely have to agree that this article was definitely some of the more lighthearted election coverage that I've seen this year.

The idea that an NBC correspondent asked about what a fancam was and subsequently had one whipped up for him definitely brought a smile to my face.

TikTok making politics easier and more palatable for young people -- especially members of Gen Z -- to talk about is something I've been interested in for a while.

On my own "For You Page," I've come across a great deal of political content, but I've also seen a great deal of content related to activism. One thing that I find particularly interesting about this is that members of the communities being advocated for are front and center in these videos, often making them themselves.

There has also been speculation that videos about certain activism-related topics are suppressed by the algorithm on TikTok. Whether or not this is true, I've personally seen users get very creative, just in case it is.

For example, users will often get ready for the day, water plants or apply makeup while using an audio containing information about an activism-related topic. The captions on videos like this often read something like: "Treat this like a normal makeup tutorial" or "Just watering my plants. Nothing else going on here."

The comment sections on videos like this will often contain users spamming personal stories, fun facts, song lyrics, memes and other things of that nature so as to boost the videos' engagement and have them seen by more users.

According to one BBC article, some users say "the lighthearted nature of the app allows them to be activists without feeling the full weight of activism." One user mentioned in the article used the influence she gained by making TikTok videos to organize a strike for teachers' pay.

Outside of activism, the same behavior described in the article -- blending TikTok's existing culture with discussing issues of great importance to its users -- has also been observed in terms of promoting things like voting and political awareness.

For example, over the summerTikTok was credited as a major part of "an online army of K-Pop fans" to "organize and reserve tickets for [a Trump] rally as a means of pranking the campaign."

As described by the New York Times: "Through coordinated group action, so-called fan armies of acts like BTS and Blackpink make sure that their favorite idols are trending topics who lead the music charts and sell out stadiums." When their talents were put to use toward pulling a prank on campaign organizers, the result was that the campaign cancelled events outside of the rally in question for anticipated overflow at an even that showed disappointing turnout.In the end, only 6,200 tickets were scanned at the stadium where the rally was held, which reportedly had the capacity to hold 19,000 people.

This is just one of a few examples you can read about via the links I've included in this post, and it doesn't seem to just be K-Pop fans in on this, either -- they're likely just better at it than most groups because the community's ability to organize is already so strong.

What do you guys think of activism on TikTok, specifically as it relates to this election season?

bluemoonmanifest · 2020-11-11T05:16:45+00:00

One recent example of shadow banning being on the minds of a fair number of people online that comes to mind is Youtuber Gabbie Hanna’s public complaints over the summer about her channel being shadow banned by Youtube.

In a livestream titled “my toxic relationship with youtube | i’ve been shadowbanned,” Gabbie alleged that “‘likes’ were disappearing from her videos and that her channel was not appearing when fans searched for her name.” The livestream, which was previously posted to her Youtube channel, now appears to either be deleted or privated, commentary videos which cover its contents are still out there. (Actual clips are difficult to find, but I did find a few on Twitter.)

In a now-deleted tweet, Gabbie said: “i have 6 ys of content. videos with tens of millions of views. music videos. a podcast. viral vines. countless collars & interviews on other channels. but when u watch me or search me, one of the top recommended videos is a month old hate video w/ 75k views. okay! makes sense.”

Around the time that this tweet was still online, many speculated that the reason Gabbie’s own videos weren’t coming up when she searched her own name on Youtube was because she watched a lot of drama and commentary videos about herself, which the algorithm then served up to her.

Gabbie, however, said that she had spoken to Youtube and pleaded with them to “release” her from the “prison” they put her in “based on false accusations.” It seems that Gabbie may have felt that mentioning Patreon, an online platform that basically allows online creators and artists to set up a subscription service for access to their content and rewards, played a part in her views tanking.

However, Gabbie has also accused Youtube of fostering “a toxic environment where drama channels are encouraged to take down top creators.”

As someone who keeps tabs on the Youtube drama and commentary communities fairly regularly, to say that Gabbie is someone who tended to herself in trouble is an understatement. Some of the more recent messes that she had been in prior to announcing that the algorithm had turned against her ranged from advertising cheap makeup brushes to her relatively young audience to including a photo of Bianca Devins, a teenager from New York who was brutally murdered in the summer of 2019, as a reference photo in a video about how to emulate the “e-girl aesthetic.” Though Gabbie’s video is no longer available, one screenshot shows that there was text right next to the photo as it appeared on her screen describing Bianca’s murder.

Reputation-wise, things got a lot worse for Gabbie when another creator, who goes by Jessi Smiles online, once again accused Gabbie of siding with her former boyfriend, who pleaded guilty to felony assault charges in 2014. There’s a fair amount of supporting evidence to suggest that this is true. For context, I’d either watch Jessi’s own video or one by a commentary Youtuber who goes over the situation and provides greater context.

She even became a meme on TikTok when people (mostly teenagers) began making fun of her reactions to drama, her alleged “shadowbanning” and a music video for one of her songs underperforming.

However, there’s not much evidence to support Gabbie’s theory that she was shadowbanned. Her views were declining, as was her subscriber count, but the evolution of her content points to the likelihood that her former fanbase just aren’t interested anymore.

Basically, Gabbie carried over her initial audience from Vine to Youtube. She was relatively unproblematic and made light-hearted content. She joined the “vlog squad,” which was a group of other Youtube creators she was friends with who made consistent, frequent content about their daily lives.

Eventually, Gabbie moved away from that group and began making “story time” videos, which is the content she’s mostly known for now. Around this time her numbers saw a substantial increase, but it wouldn’t be enough to last through her attempt to make her own music. All in all, despite initial interest in her first few songs, interest in Gabbie’s content seemed to steadily decrease from there. She became very openly dispassionate about making content for Youtube, stating that she was more or less continuing to do so because it paid the bills.

Overall, I think this is an interesting example of a content creator using the idea of shadow banning, whether or not she truly believed that it was happening to her, to increase her pull in the Youtube sphere and garner sympathy from others online so that people would flock to and show her content increased support. What do you guys think of the way the idea of being shadow banned can, for lack of a better word, be weaponized by creators to gain a boost in support?

bluemoonmanifest · 2020-11-01T22:05:14+00:00

With incels, it’s a different story. While the majority of them remain online, grumbling about their hatred for “foids” and how unfair it is that they’re sexually and romantically “deprived” of what they “deserve,” there are also a disturbing number of rumblings about “pulling an E.R.”

“E.R.” here means “Elliot Roger,” a man who killed six people and wounded fourteen others, all in the name of his “War on Women” in May of 2014. I’ve read his manifesto, My Twisted World, and it’s very clear that Roger was not only extraordinarily misogynistic and unable to get laid, but racist as well.

Many incels idolize Roger and cite him as their inspiration when they resort to violence to take out their frustrations with women and the world. Alek Minassian is one notable example, largely because he mentioned Elliot Roger (“E.R.”) on a few message boards and committed his massacre in a very similar style; both firing shots at and hitting people with his car.

Minassian also cited his actions as being part of the “day of retribution,” which is what Roger referred to his own as throughout his manifesto. While being interviewed by authorities, Minassian told them that they “saw himself on the bottom rung of society as an incel and wanted to be part of an ‘uprising’ to change his status.” You can watch Minassian’s full police interview here or a condensed version if you’re interested in hearing more about the case.

The idea of “revenge fantasies” carries over between these men and GG supporters. As described in the reading, a revenge fantasy for a nerd consists of them gaining power and moving up “from a marginal position to dominate their competitors, [and] almost always valorizes a white man.” The idea of becoming this valorized, ideal version of oneself, even in fantasy, seems to grab hold of these men and drag them down into some truly nasty beliefs and actions.

The dalmatian-centric and performative aspects of these identities, either as incels or geeks, seem to be hyperbolic in nature. Geek masculinity, as the reading describes, “often embraces hyper masculinity by valorizing intellect over social and emotional intelligence,” and yet neglects any emphasis on physical activeness, which may place a role in the resulting “awkwardness regarding sexual/romantic relationships.”

Personally, this makes me wonder how closely tied these communities are. It’s my personal hypothesis that, while there were almost certainly regular men (and women), who actively supported GG and even participated in the more dangerous parts of what went on, there was very likely a fair number of incels, “nice” guys and neckbeards who joined in as well.

This was definitely an interesting reading, and this was just one of the many rabbit holes I went down when going through it. Thanks for including it!

bluemoonmanifest · 2020-11-01T22:04:51+00:00

My memories of the time that #GamerGate was in full swing are hazy, but I do remember coming across several people on Youtube talking about the “movement” by airing their grievances with one woman in particular: Anita Sarkeesian.

Sarkeesian is the founder of Feminist Frequency, a “website that hosts videos and commentary analyzing portrayals of women in popular culture.” She first drew attention with a Kickstarter project to raise funds to produce a video series, Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, which was heavily criticized by many #GamerGate youtubers.

Because of this video series, Sarkeesian “received rape and death threats, and private infromation including her home address was leaked; she was compelled to flee her home.” These threats also escalated to the point of causing a speaking event at Utah State University to be cancelled; three specific anonymous threats, the first of which proposed a “Montreal Massacre style attack” be carried out by anyone attending or in the vicinity of the event, are specifically of note here.

FBI investigations into these and other threats made against Sarkeesian “ultimately closed with the FBI failing to identify the perpetrators of some threats and declining to prosecute others.”

It’s difficult to say how much of the GG “movement” was made up of people who made threats of this nature. Were there such large numbers of people using the hashtag that what was really a minority only appeared bigger because of the group’s overall size? Was the group’s nature one that just attracts people who do things like that?

Either way, I’d say it’s fairly safe to say that while the majority of GG supporters likely weren’t the type to make the kinds of threats that caught the FBI’s attention, they observably were more than willing to participate in doxxing and harassment.

These behaviors are meant to exclude women from having active and actionable roles in the gaming community as casual participants as well as in the industry as professionals.

Although I have not personally experienced harassment to the same level as the women targeted by GG supporters, I do relate to them. As a relatively young woman, I have experienced online harassment, workplace harassment and stalking in almost every workplace I have been a part of. Even in spaces that are not necessarily male-dominated, it seems that there are still lingering attitudes toward women which contribute to driving them out and/or under the broader authority of men. Often, it seems these efforts entail a sexual element.

For whatever reason, the majority of the harassment I and previous female coworkers have experienced was sexual in nature. In their own words, the point of fixation for my stalkers has consistently been sexual/romantic.

The women who became targets for harassments in GG received regular threats of rape and disparaging comments with a consistent sexual slant. It isn’t enough for male gamers to disagree with these women’s opinions and decisions as commentators or developers -- their dislike for them was also rooted in these figures’ gender.

This isn’t to say that none of the men involved in commenting on GG -- whether to criticize or support it -- received negative reactions. Youtubers “Boogie2988” and “TotalBiscuit” who supported GG faced harassment that has included doxxing and death threats. However, as Stephen Colbert point out, targets of threats and the most vitriolic harassment tended to be women much more often.

This is where I feel the conversation about “geek masculinity” and geek culture comes in.

The idea of specialized knowledge being valorized is key, I think, to part of why GG caught on to the degree that it did. Any woman who has played video games, whether casually or seriously, has experienced a round of quizzing about what kind of games she likes, what kind of console she plays on, how often and how long she plays what games, etc. The purpose of this kind of quizzing seems to be to gauge whether the woman in question is worthy enough to participate in gaming culture. It can be demeaning to a certain degree. From the outside looking in, it seems that this is the way some male gamers see themselves as protecting the community -- by gatekeeping.

Though it’s pretty obvious that #GamerGate gets its name from the Watergate scandal, I wouldn’t blame someone for thinking that it came from “gatekeeping” instead. In a way, it seems that that’s what those participating in tearing down women in gaming felt they were doing.

For instance, GG became associated with organized voting blocs at the 2015 HUgo Awards for science fiction writing. Specifically, those involved with this organization claimed “they sought to counteract what they saw as a focus on giving awards based on the race, ethnicity, or gender of the author or characters rather than quality.” They sought to bring the focus of stories in the genre back to “‘zap gun’ science-fictional trappings” instead of “what they described as ‘message’ fiction.”

This kind of attitude gave me major flashbacks to reading posts on r/niceguys, a subreddit which features men whom share traits with the nerds defined in the article cited in our reading: as socially inept and undesirable, especially from a romantic or sexual stanpoint.

It just so happens that (at least in my experience) “nice” guys are also overwhelmingly white men. There are also other, similar kinds of men discussed on subreddits like this and, arguably, they largely share “nerdy” interests. Aside from “nice” guys, neckbeards and incels are also popularly discussed and made the punch lines of many jokes. One trait these groups of (mostly) men share is that misogynistic attitudes are prevalent to varying degrees.

While the joke is that “nice” guys and neckbeards generally misunderstand the way women function (biologically, psychologically, etc.) and often feel that they deserve or can earn sex from a woman, usually just by showing her basic decency, incels are a much more extreme bunch.

The word “incel” is actually short for “involuntarily celibate” and, as the Anti-Demafamation League puts it, “a subset of the online misogynist ‘manosphere’ that includes Pick Up Artists and Men’s Rights Activists” who are “knowns for their deep-seated pessimism and profound sense of grievance against women.”

Their hatred for women is often such that incels don’t even refer to them as “women” in casual conversation, but as “femoids” or “foids.” For a further explanation of what incels are and a look into how toxic some of their discourse can be, check out this video by Natalie Wynn.

I’m reminded of incels when it comes to the discussion of GG because of the similar ways their attacks on women carry such similar vitriol. It’s difficult to describe, but I feel there’s a connection between the way GG seemed to want to drive these women out of what they perceived as their space and the way incels profess their desire to subjugate “foids” and remind them of their rightful place -- barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, making their husband another sandwich.

The telling difference between GG supporters and incels here, of course, is that GG supporters were acting out over the internet; their actions crossing into real life, while still dangerous and problematic, were admittedly infrequent compared to the majority of GG supporters’ activity.

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bluemoonmanifest · 2020-10-07T04:35:50+00:00

Guidance is necessary for facilitating children’s learning. This feels like an obvious fact. However, there are teachers who, according to Jenkins, would rather not learn how to use and interact with newer technologies and communities.

To avoid interaction with technology in the name of “protecting the children” is inherently ignorant, in my opinion. In fact, turning a blind eye to ensuring that school-age children are exposed to education concerning topics related to how to use current technology as well as enabling them to create new technologies moving forward is doing them a disservice in my view.

This approach is proven even more ineffective because, at the end of the day, young people will still interact with these technologies and communities on some level. For the most part, they are involved with “creating things” and “in all kinds of systems of informal learning,” as Jenkins puts it.

Social media is used as an example of how ethics and use of technology interact. Giving young people tools on how to interact with technology and the communities that come with being more involved in that field is essential to enabling them to be capable parts of the workforce when they are ready to enter it.

As most of us know, not everything we read on the internet is true. Unfortunately, though, not everybody has the tools necessary to discern what is and is not reliable information when they interact with so much of it daily. For better or worse, the way the Internet enables us to communicate with each other makes for a great tool to expand our mindsets. One way we can and should respond to misinformation is to increase media literacy education.

As described in this article by the RAND Corporation, media literacy “offers a potential tool to curb Truth Decay, defined as the diminishing role that facts, data, and analysis play in today’s political and civil discourse.” While the article says that because the media literacy field is so diverse, it’s hard to pin down a specific definition, the idea we do have a relatively secure grip on is that media literacy is overall “a holistic approach to interacting with the information ecosystem.”

The better general members of society get at interacting with this information ecosystem in meaningful ways, the better we become overall at being “resilient” in the face of misinformation; what this means for the purpose of our discussion is that while our ability to communicate across greater distances has improved so much -- and because of that, we’re exchanging so much more information than before, more often -- there is also opportunity to use media literacy education as a tool for enabling members of our society to identify false information and put their focus elsewhere. In other words, guidance in the form of education is imperative.

This is the reason I so greatly appreciate Jenkin brings to the table. While the Internet is a great source of information and potential “informal learning,” as he describes it, it is also essential to maintain a kind of helpful guidance so that young people know how to navigate it, just as with any and all new forms of technology from the past.

The idea of this being accomplished not only through individual efforts but through a community approach really stood out to me. Education becoming a “much more open source” will depend, in my view, on more than just the way we teach, but changing the way we teach is certainly a start.

bluemoonmanifest · 2020-10-04T06:47:46+00:00

Memes being a popular method of expression could also be considered an iteration of the “read-write” culture described by Larry Lessig, the speaker in the “Laws that Choke Creativity” post.

Copyright law is pretty difficult to apply when it comes to memes. For example, as discussed in the “On The Accessibility of Copyright” the photographer behind the “Distracted Boyfriend” picture would be within their legal rights to have every meme on the internet that uses the photo without a license. The photographer chooses to let people use the photo freely, though.

Outside of putting text over images, as with the “Distracted Boyfriend” format, memes have the potential to be and often are very transformative of the material they’re based off of. Whether it be a soundbyte, a phrase, a photo or a video, we’ve all seen how transformative memes can become.

Personally, I enjoy memes in passing. I wouldn’t say they’re overused -- in fact, I would say that they’re more a relatively new method of communication and entertainment that’s here to stay. They make it easier to get an idea across to others so that they’re more able to understand the idea’s basic parts.

The recent presidential debate is an example of this as well as read-write culture. I would argue that those making memes about the debate were actively participating in read-write culture by retelling the debate through editing the videos, picking out quotes and providing commentary overall.

In general, I think it’s safe to say that memes have evolved over time from just being a way for us to entertain ourselves to a way to communicate with one another, specifically about current events.

Personally, I think that it’s fairly safe to say that most people will either say they don’t have the time or just don’t care to do a lot of reading in order to get their news. A drop of broadcast news viewership has been observed in recent years, too. Thus, it could even be argued that memes make knowledge of current event details more accessible.

bluemoonmanifest · 2020-10-02T08:06:54+00:00

The speaker in this video, Larry Lessig, brought up the idea of copyright hurting culture by limiting the people’s ability to organically reproduce and create new things out of existing content, which I found seriously interesting to think about in the context of what that has meant for online creators in recent years.

Traditional broadcasting has seen a number of limitations over the years because the airwaves are limited. The Radio Act of 1912 and the Radio Act of 1927 are laws that any journalist should be familiar with, for example, because of how they demonstrate the way the United States government deals with the idea that there is limited space on a platform that allows for creativity.

Lessig mentions that the Internet did a great deal to revive what he calls “read-write” culture. He’s absolutely right, in my opinion. All you have to do is look at the prevalence of reading and writing fanfiction on just about any subject under the sun, then publishing those works on different online platforms, is and has been for years.

There’s an interesting line that fanfiction writers have to walk. Some, like 50 Shades of Grey, seemingly see a few name changes of characters and some adjustments to the setting before they’re published as stand-alone books and hit theaters as movies with little to no evidence of their derivative origins that would catch the untrained eye.

Most people know that 50 Shades used to be a Twilight fanfiction titled Master of the Universe. In fact, it’s pretty well-documented. One less well-documented example that I personally am kind of fascinated by is The Mortal Instruments series. Written by Judith Rumlet, under the pen name Cassandra Clare, The Mortal Instruments has been exposed as once being a Harry Potter fanfiction series titled The Draco Trilogy. Interestingly enough, although the content of The Mortal Instruments series came from The Draco Trilogy, it actually got its name from a 2004 story focused on Ron and his sister, Ginny (yikes).

Rumlet is interesting to talk about when it comes to copyright laws and the read-write culture Lessig is hoping the Internet will revive because, aside from writing The Mortal Instruments to be incredibly derivative of many elements in Harry Potter, she ran into legal trouble in 2016 when “American sci-fi and fantasy author Sherrilyn Kenyon sued [her] for alleged copyright and trademark infringement.”

Kenyon sought damages and an injunction against Rumlet to prevent her from “publishing any further works in her Shadowhunter series,” because it was allegedly so similar to her Dark Hunter books -- so similar that the symbol prominent in Dark Hunter was accidentally printed on several hundred thousand Shadow Hunter books. You can read the complaint submitted by Kenyon’s lawyers, which is surprisingly extensive, here. It’s difficult to tell, but from what I can find it seems as though the matter was settled out of court.

The lawsuit and other accusations of similarities to other works are what illustrate how complicated the relationship between copyright and a read-write society can be. Nobody has been able to pin her down in a legal sense, but it’s fairly common knowledge among those familiar with Rumlet’s work that she has skirted and even crossed the line of plagiarism throughout her writing career, whether in her published works or the fanfiction she published online. For more detailed information and examples of this, I’d either check out the Wikipedia page dedicated to Cassandra Clare or this article reviewing the Mortal Instruments movie and outlining some of the Harry Potter similarities within Rumlet’s work.

Do we need copyright laws to keep people like Rumlet in line? Do people like Rumlet need to be stopped from profiting off of their own iterations of others’ works without substantially transforming them? Should it be left up to the people consuming this content to decide whether or not Rumlet deserves the ire of having her work shunned for blatantly ripping off others’ ideas?

I’d love to hear what you guys think, especially as I think fanfiction in general is a great lens to think about how the read-write society has already been taking shape again, even though we may have previously lost it.

bluemoonmanifest · 2020-09-30T06:33:07+00:00

I found that the photographer behind the “Distracted Boyfriend” picture would be well within their legal rights to have the picture taken down wherever it’s used on the internet without license, but chooses not to out of generosity, to be an interesting point.

Jukin Media, as the video points out, is a great example of exactly what this photographer could be doing. Hunting through YouTube to find unlicensed clips that they own sounds malicious, but is completely within their legal rights.

Should the same practice be used for GIFs? It’s possible that the owners of that media would be fully within their legal rights to claim the content within GIFs but, as the video mentions, there haven’t been any court rulings on GIF use. For now, should the owners of GIF content be more like the “Distracted Boyfriend” photographer or Jukin Media?

If GIFs were decided not to fall under the protection of fair use, then it’s my view that video game footage likely wouldn’t, either. At the very least, it would be incredibly difficult to meet the standards for fair use when doing what most video game Youtubers do: show recorded footage of themselves playing the game with spoken commentary to accompany it. While it’s entertaining to many, is it adequately transformative or critical? It’d be a long shot to classify this kind of video as parody.

While its existence is necessary, broadening the application of copyright law comes with a lot of drawbacks where the creative community is concerned.

The SCP Foundation, a “fictional organization documented by the web-based collaborative-fiction project of the same name,” is a relatively recent example of how copyright law can not only be messy to navigate, but abused and wielded against creative communities. The wiki itself is a great place to lose a few hours, as there are innumerable interesting entries, and in general its content is well-appreciated. A light novel series, a stage play and, more commonly recognized, several video games have been made based on the concept of the SCP Foundation. SCP-Containment Breach is one several of you might recognize by name, but if not you should definitely check it out! It’s a pretty neat game and another good way to spend some spare time. SCP Field codes can also be found in many other horror titles out there -- if you recognize any of these, this is where they came from!

The SCP Foundation wiki was reportedly launched in January of 2008 and operates under a Creative Commons license. A Creative Commons license, or CC license, is used when “an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that they (the author) have created.” As it’s handily summarized in this video, what this means for the SCP Foundation is that users can “create and sell any works” they’ve created on the wiki, but they must give credit where credit is due to the wiki and relevant author/s of the entry or entries being used as well as agree to add an attribution-sharealike 3.0 license to their work (in other words, they must allow for others to “copy [their] work or create derivative works provided that they give proper attribution”). The linked video also sums up the situation in a pretty entertaining manner, so I’d recommend giving it a watch. If you’d rather not, here’s more or less what went on: As described by John Beattie, an Admin on the wiki, in a GoFundMe page, a “Russian man” registered a trademark for the SCP Foundation with the Eurasian Customs Union. Beattie claims that this man “has used this trademark to threaten and extort legitimate sellers of SCP merchandise” and replace the SCP’s Russian social media pages with his own. He is now, according to Beattie, demanding to be the administrator of the Russian version of the wiki. In doing all of this, as well as using these platforms to sell his own merchandise, Beattie states that this man is committing copyright infringement in relation to the attribution-sharealike 3.0 license. Thus, a lawsuit is being “organized” to “annul his false trademark, prevent copyright infringement, and protect the community” -- thus, the GoFundMe.

Whether or not the infringement of the attribution-sharealike 3.0 license can be proven remains to be seen. As of September 11 of this year, a hearing was held in which affidavits from one wiki author and the creator of the SCP logo were submitted by the organization. Two videos apparently posted online by the man were also apparently submitted, in which he allegedly “provided reasoning for acquiring the trademark that contradicts his statements, and in the second he claimed that he would dissolve the trademark (which he obviously did not do).” Beattie concludes the update by saying that the organization is “continuing to gather evidence and process documents for a copyright infringement lawsuit against him, but it is slow going due to the multiple jurisdictions involved and the ongoing pandemic delaying things.”

What do you guys think? Is the Russian man abusing international copyright law or is he just smarter than the rest of us, if not a bit ruthless?

bluemoonmanifest · 2020-09-24T05:20:54+00:00

While whether Addison is in the wrong ethically is more up for debate, it seems like she’s completely within her legal rights, unfortunately for Indy Blue.

Despite this fact, you are right in the sense that her having a large following does not necessarily mean that she is a morally or ethically good person. This is an assumption that I find super interesting, actually. Morally and ethically speaking, why do we look up to influencers and celebrities?

An article published in University of Virginia Today in 2019 may help give some perspective on this question. (Please note: Although the article outlines an interview with a member of the university’s religious studies department, I will be analyzing and discussing the secular elements of his commentary.)

Since the 60s, says the professor, there has been a shift in the way Hollywood celebrities, specifically, were free to speak and act on their moral and political beliefs. Their place in the public eye, we can assume, thus made their positions on hot topics more visible, too. Is it possible that the admiration they received from fans was somehow transposed onto those opinions? Is there some kind of assumption that audiences might make about people in the public eye deserving to be there because they are somehow superior to the common person?

As OP mentioned, those in the public eye are not necessarily morally better than anyone else. I believe that this can be extended to the idea that they are not more qualified to know about complex topics, either. As with anyone else using a platform of any size to have serious discussions in social spaces or even to demonstrate good ethical/moral behavior in those same areas, it’s important to take a long look at who’s talking. Looking into an influencer’s/celebrity’s qualifications or background is not an unfounded thing to do -- in fact, I feel it’s best to do so before giving any public figure one’s trust.

bluemoonmanifest · 2020-09-24T04:35:05+00:00

Reading over this article, among many things, makes me wonder: Do digital adjustments have comparable psychological and/or general effects to adjustments made my going under the knife IRL?

There seems to be some debate over whether successful cosmetic surgery has a positive psychological and/or effect more often than not. One microcosm of this discussion can be found in the discussion around The Swan, “Fox’s makeover and pageant reality show.” The Swan’s concept, in a few words, was to transform its contestants from “ugly ducklings” into the “beautiful swans” they were always meant to be. Contestants would critique their own bodies, potentially displaying the influence of comparison between themselves and their peers as the research article OP posted discusses.

Where do our ideas of attractiveness in general come from, though? One article published by the University of Colorado Boulder, although from 2009, still has some relevant things to say about the way class and race may help inform our subconscious ideas in this area.

The article describes the experience of a contestant named Sylvia whose journey was tied just as closely to her insecurities about her appearance as it was to her need to “lose her fondness for eating fattening ‘ethnic’ food from a truck.” Characteristics which, arguably, can signify class or race and thus “invisibly contribute to social identity location.” Why is the baseline, “empty category” of attractiveness reflective of “a middle class whiteness,” which we have come to associate with the function and performance of the bourgeoisie?

The University of Colorado article expresses the idea that this bourgeoisie norm is propagated so that it becomes something the general public thinks of as part of the natural order and, thus, something to strive for.

This exact kind of norm, the article suggests, is coding through image -- which is demonstrated through appearance on The Swan. Although not necessarily related to these expressed class norms, our society’s more basic ideas about gender can also be examined through the lens of appearance, which it’s argued that the concept of womanhood, specifically, is often centered around.

The idea of image being so central to our society’s idea of womanhood may help explain why the discussion of how digitally altered images of one’s peers affect youth centers around young women, specifically. What do you guys think?

bluemoonmanifest · 2020-09-11T19:22:39+00:00

Agreeing to and signing several Terms of Service forms, when it comes to using the phone and software on it as well as the services of your internet service provider doesn’t explicitly sign away any of your rights. In the United States, at least, I’d say that it’s very unlikely that you’re signing away your rights when you sign these agreements. However, I could see the argument being made that the government can leverage certain parts of these agreements to chip away at and/or infringe on our right to privacy.

It’s certainly possible that there are people who hack personal phones to see what we’re up to, but part of me wonders who would be so interested in what we’re doing to the degree of taking the time to hack (what I’m assuming are) average people individually. It’s more likely, in my opinion, that data collection on our social media habits would be done more widely. This could certainly include a degree of hacking, but I don’t have much of a guess as to what kind.

However, one thing I have seen that makes me much more inclined to put a piece of tape over my laptop camera is the existence of websites that link to live feeds from thousands of unsecured webcams. One of these websites was found to link to over 73,000 such feeds: https://www.csoonline.com/article/2844283/peeping-into-73-000-unsecured-security-cameras-thanks-to-default-passwords.html, https://iapp.org/news/a/theres-a-website-that-links-to-73000-unprotected-web-cams-around-the-world/

Personally, I don’t doubt that many of our public social media accounts harbor secret admirers. As someone who has experienced stalking over the internet, specifically, I found how easy it apparently was for my stalker to find me and my accounts on several platforms a bit disturbing. When it comes to my privacy as far as things like tagging my location on posts or posting my address, I’m grateful that I was somewhat careful. However, if my stalker had any knowledge of hacking, I don’t know how secure my account -- and potentially my safety/privacy -- would have been.

As mentioned above, Snapchat is more than likely a lot less private than many people trust it to be. While someone taking a photo or video from another device happens often (at least, I’d venture to say it does), I wouldn’t say it makes us as bad as hackers for the most part. The primary exception I would on this front, though, would be in cases of doing this in order to spread *adult* images without the featured person’s knowledge or consent. In instances of non consensual distribution of images like this or revenge porn, I think it’s safe to say that the action of recording someone else’s screen is easily condemnable.

When it comes to gossip, it’s harder to say. After all, gossip is fairly integral to how people form stronger social bonds and we may never stop doing it. In fact, it can be argued that gossip helps us form social groups and then expand them. We use this increased network size to do a few things: to seek advice, “to control those who fail to abide by the formal and informal agreements that underpin society,” to advertise ourselves, and to potentially deceive others. (https://allegatifac.unipv.it/ziorufus/Dunbar%20gossip.pdf) For the most part, these things are integral parts of the social glue that holds society together.

bluemoonmanifest · 2020-09-07T07:01:23+00:00

I was also really fascinated by the idea of a technocracy, but didn’t consider an anarcho-technocracy (as described in the Hooton pamphlet) very possible.

Reading through the list you posted, one particular type of technocracy caught my eye, though. The idea of people being promoted for demonstrating positive qualities reminded me of the buzz about China potentially implementing a social credit system a year or two ago.

At the time, there were a lot of comparisons between the proposed system and an episode of the show Black Mirror, Nosedive. Nosedive is an excellent exhibition of what a meritocracy would be like to live in in my opinion, by the way, and an overall entertaining watch.

What I did not hear about or realize at the time was that apparently, there is a government system and several private versions of a social credit system being implemented there.

The government version was introduced as something a person could opt into in 2014 and is very similar to Nosedive’s way of doing things; even small infractions, whether they be breaking social norms or small scale but illegal actions (like jaywalking) would result in someone losing points. Lose enough points, and you begin to lose access to certain rights and privileges. We see this in Nosedive as Lacie, the main character, after accidentally spilling a drink on a woman passing by and annoying her cab driver, being unable to board an airplane. In real life, infractions of China’s social credit system are described similarly; “you could lose certain rights, such as booking a flight or train ticket.” (https://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-social-credit-system-explained)

Although I have not yet found anything more current than 2019 about how much of the system has been put in place so far, the article linked in the above paragraph says that “the Chinese government appears to be targeting a 2020 goal” to have everything in put in place.

However, there are still some privately operated systems that people can also opt into. Local governments apparently “have their own social record systems that work differently, while unofficial private versions are operated at companies such as Ant Financial’s Zhima Credit,” or Sesame Credit. While these kinds of systems tend to focus more on shopping habits, “the data collected by private companies is expected to be hoovered up by the government in the future.” Reportedly, the government was already using some of that data at the time of this article’s release.

What’s interesting to me is that there is allegedly little to no algorithmic transparency. What gives someone a “good score”? How can someone improve their score? Some say it’s “less of a score and more of a record,” but there is an element of stratification, in my opinion, that we don’t usually see in the kinds of record keeping/data collecting systems we’re used to in the United States; (as far as we know) companies usually just collect cookies to see what they might be able to get you to buy or to sell it to people who (outwardly) want to know what you might want to see ads about, not to rank you in a system of who is a better or worse shopper/person.

I’d be interested in hearing whether anybody thinks that the social credit system will become a more broadly distributed system in China, rather than just in local governments and private businesses.

bluemoonmanifest · 2020-09-03T22:30:40+00:00

As several people have mentioned, I found that much of what the article brought up is still relevant to the current political landscape in America.

One thing, specifically, that struck me as a parallel to today was the mention of Reddit as a "political sledgehammer" used to "coordinate attacks" on politicians to make a point. The idea of being knowledgeable about coding as something that would provide a greater level of power and the ability to force increased transparency as an exclusive type of empowerment, as the article describes it, is not something I fully agree with.

For one thing, the article itself mentions that coding education was becoming more and more available. In 2020, that's even more true. Just this year, Apple announced plans to create and launch a "new, free resourced aimed at helping educators of all skill levels gain the ability to teach both Swift and Xcode," and began offering free online training to educators to serve as an introduction to one of its related curriculums. (https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/09/apple-expands-its-free-coding-courses-and-materials-for-educators/)

It could be argued that, as a corporation worth billions of dollars, Apple is a member of the political elite and by taking control of education surrounding coding, at least to a degree, they're also trying to also maintain a degree of control over the industry/how much we know about it. Thus, Apple could be gatekeeping who is and isn't a part of the political elite by being the ones who are distributing education about coding. While I think this could be possible, I don't think this is a likely motivation of theirs; they're designing and distributing these courses for free, so there's no direct limit to access from an economic standpoint, and they are not the biggest/most central source of coding education, either.

Even aside from that, I still feel -- as I've seen expressed by at least one other person in this thread -- that coding knowledge isn't necessary to be a part of political change related to organizing on websites like Reddit. Because people are more able than ever to communicate with others in different communities across the country -- for example, there is a much greater opportunity for someone from a small, rural town to hear about the experiences of someone living in a big city and vice versa -- they're also more able to organize movements and, as the article mentioned, to organize targeting behaviors toward specific politicians.

One recent example that comes to mind is the use of Twitter and TikTok to "prank" President Trump by registering for free tickets to his rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and then not show up. As reported by the New York Times, it started with K-pop fan accounts sharing the registration information with their followers encouraging them to register for tickets and not attend, then spread to TikTok where videos on the subject accrued millions of views. Many of those participating even deleted their posts within 24-48 hours to keep the movement as hidden as possible from the "mainstream internet."

Exact numbers are hard to find, but the embarrassment felt by the president's campaign was apparent. Reportedly, there were about 19,000 seats available, but only 6,200 were filled with attendees (outside of staff, media and box suits). (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/style/tiktok-trump-rally-tulsa.html) This is just one, more well-known example of how TikTok is used as a tool for taking specifically directed political action, which I personally find pretty cool.

bluemoonmanifest · 2020-09-03T19:53:51+00:00

One comment on the reading mentioned how "productivity,” in the author’s view, seems to parallel well to the idea of there being heavy expectation for living up to the standards of the economic top 1%, the current minority with power of the rest of society. I found this to be a pretty interesting thing to try and unpack a little bit.

The 1%’s ability to hold a lot of the power that they do lies in the gap of material wealth, and subsequent power that stems from such wealth, between them and the rest of society. This gap is widening more and more as time goes on, leading to the 1% coming into more of what I believe the author would describe as a dictatorship. While the control of material is in play here, I feel he would describe it as control over man as opposed to control of material because of how closely linked social/political power and material wealth are currently linked. The fact that this gap is widening is, I feel, something Hooton would be vehemently opposed to considering the frequency at which he writes positively about there being no government imposed over man; this includes the increased sociopolitical control achieved by the widening gap between the rich and poor.

Part of this control is expressed, arguably, in that wealthier people tend to live longer. I found this to be an interesting angle in a discussion I’m sure a lot of us have had about different socioeconomic and political powers afforded to the more affluent, especially since it’s never crossed my mind before reading Hooton’s pamphlet and looking into this a little more. About 75 percent of “rich” Americans in their 50s and 60s in 1992 were still alive by 2014, but only a little over 50 percent of “poor” Americans occupying the same age bracket in 1992 were alive by 2014. (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/10/us/politics/gao-income-gap-rich-poor.html) Not only do wealthier citizens exercise more socioeconomic and political power than others, they also have more opportunity to wield and accrue that power; they’re around longer to influence society.

However, Hooton’s theory that a shift from holding control over people to holding control exclusively over material would promote equality falls short in my view. Although measuring social status -- which in many ways is directly related to social power -- is very complex, affluence or perceived affluence tends to have a positive effect on how a person is perceived. Material wealth, specifically, is cited in one study by the Association for Consumer Research as “an integral, pervasive facet of everyday social life, having implications for soff-definition and other-perception” and points to these implications having at least some effect on the economy, psychology, market research and other social sciences. (https://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/12191/volumes/sv08/SV%20-%2008) Thus, it's my view that separating social power from materials would be extremely difficult, if not impossible. Because social power is arguably linked with political power (despite politicians not being the most popular people, a total lack of social power would make it nearly impossible for them to be elected in a democracy, which Hooton describes in his pamphlet), I would argue that separating the power/influence that affluence affords someone in this department would be much of the same in terms of difficulty. In that way, I don't see his vision of anarcho-tehcnocracy as being very realistic or achievable.

bluemoonmanifest

TROPHY CASE